The disturbing images we recently saw at the Southwest border might seem to indicate that Donald Trump was right.

For weeks, he’d warned us about the caravan of “terrorists” approaching on foot from Central America — and maybe even the Middle East — eager to storm into our country and slaughter us.

Now, we’ve seen for ourselves how ruthless they are. Too cowardly to face U.S. troops guarding the border head-on, they tore away metal sheeting from the fence and tried to climb over it. Some managed to get through the line of Mexican police to reach a dusty riverbed they thought would lead to America.

U.S. Border Patrol agents stopped them by shooting off canisters of tear gas, leaving them crying, coughing and gasping for air. Some vomited, and some were so traumatized that they fainted.

Trump told us there would be trouble once these dangerous people reached our border. He told us that we must be afraid, very afraid of these “stone cold killers.” He told us that we must do whatever is necessary to stop them from entering our country.

What he didn’t tell us, though, is that some of them would be wearing diapers and desperately trying to hold onto their mother’s hand. He did not prepare us for their mussed hair, their bare little feet trekking through the dirt or the fear on their grimy little faces.

Regardless of how we might feel about refugees, there’s something inhumane about firing tear gas on human beings, especially young children. Though authorities said that some of the migrants threw rocks at border agents, the use of tear gas, which is banned by the military even during war, seemed extreme.

It is likely that the tear gas was intended for the few hundred migrants who broke off from a peaceful protest. That protest was aimed at getting the U.S. to reconsider its decision to deny asylum to some 5,000 people who had made the trek from Honduras to Guatemala to Tijuana, Mexico. The children became collateral damage in Trump’s war against nations whose people he considers to be less than human.

There once was a time when America would oppose any attack that might harm children, but not anymore. Children, like adults, become our enemies when they try to enter our country.

The attempt to gain asylum at an American port of entry is not illegal. It fact, that’s exactly how it should be done. But Trump turned it into a spectacle in order to justify dispatching the military to the border to perform law enforcement duties.

He needed to paint a terrifying narrative in order to draw his supporters to the polls for the midterm elections. The rest of us saw it as a misuse of executive power that turned our dedicated soldiers into political pawns.

But we should have known that on this issue, Trump could not afford to be wrong. There could be no peaceful, uneventful arrival at the border. Otherwise Trump would have lost his most powerful tool in keeping his supporters faithful — the fear of immigrants and the change they might force on America.

So U.S. border agents had no choice but to fire that tear gas over the fence that our soldiers had so skillfully crafted. They had no choice but to create a scene so terrifying that we would realize that Trump was right all along.

With images of angry men rushing the fence exposed, we would finally understand why Trump is so determined to keep these scary people out of our midst. And we would know, once and for all, that when it comes to immigrants, there can never be compromise.

There certainly is a difference between refugees coming to America to seek asylum and immigrants who enter the country illegally. We should not confuse the two, but the lack of a clear, comprehensive immigration policy has allowed some Americans to merge them together.

That isn’t Trump’s fault alone. It’s the fault of every politician ever elected to serve in Washington who failed to pass legislation that would not only establish solid rules for immigration but also establish an equitable process for people from any nation who come here seeking asylum.

Trump reportedly is pushing Mexico to require those seeking U.S. asylum through the Southwest border to remain in Mexico while their cases make their way through the courts. If that doesn’t work out, Trump has threatened to shut down the Southern border.

That means the refugees fleeing crime and poverty in their own countries would be stuck in a Mexican border town that is struggling with its own crime and poverty.

Perhaps this group of refugees had not heard how different America is these days. Perhaps they thought that Trump’s plan to make America great again wasn’t as heartless as it seemed. Or perhaps they believed their story was the one that might grab the president’s ear.

Perhaps they did not understand how in a democracy, where the majority is supposed to rule, Americans could be helpless to stop our government from being so cruel.

It is a question we should ask ourselves. If we insist that this is not what we want America to be, if we don’t believe that this is who we are as a people, how do we make it stop?

For the sake of the entire world, it behooves all of us on this side of the border to figure it out.